For the amount of effort involved, it was a dismally unproductive week. The Northern talks came to Dublin but were doomed before they began. The agenda of North-South relationships wasn't even reached. It was an expensive, frustrating few days which started with a wrangle and ended in the High Court. Sinn Fein hogged the publicity, the SDLP was sidelined, and the unionists merely observed.
The UDP is expected back in the talks within the next couple of weeks, but with Sinn Fein out, there is growing pessimism about the May deadline for agreement. Some participants were totally despondent, but others felt the disastrous developments would concentrate minds and the prospect of another failed initiative would make the parties to the talks seriously engage and compromise.
Maybe, as suggested, Finland or Austria would be the best place to talk. Or, as has been also been mooted, the participants should, like a conclave of cardinals, be shut up in a monastery and kept there on survival rations until the white smoke emerges. Dublin, after all, was very plush. In all some 150 visitors travelled to the capital for the three days. Northern Secretary Mo Mowlam and her team stayed at the Conrad, George Mitchell and the other chairmen at the Westbury, the unionists at the provocatively named Adams Trinity Hotel in Dame Street, the SDLP at Jury's Ballsbridge, the Alliance at Jury's Christchurch, Labour and the Women's Coalition at the Shelbourne and Sinn Fein at the Temple Bar Hotel.
The cost of it all was met from the talks fund set up by the two governments and it was generally acknowledged, even by John Taylor MP, that the arrangements at Dublin Castle and outside were first class. The unionists, however, skipped much of the entertainment. They ducked out of US ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith's dinner in the Phoenix Park on Monday and took Dublin's newspaper editors and executives to dinner instead.